


White Out

by eggnogged



Category: Supernatural
Genre: First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, M/M, Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggnogged/pseuds/eggnogged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt "Sam and Dean are stranded because of the weather, at a time when things are tense between them." Set somewhere mid-S7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [De_Nugis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/gifts).



Dean wakes up shivering.

It’s pitch black and the air is heavy with moisture, like the basement of an old house or the bottom of a well, but the cracked vinyl seat sticking to his cheek is vaguely familiar and so is the crick in his neck and the ache in his knee, the very specific discomforts that you only get from sleeping in a car. Okay, so he can’t see a thing, but at least he knows where he is, still in the same place he was when he fell asleep - and not even his baby either, just another piece of crap on wheels, a beat down station wagon that smells vaguely of puke and dirty socks.

Dean turns onto his back with a stifled groan, his spine popping painfully, and fumbles in his pocket until his numb fingers close over his Zippo. He hooks an arm over the backrest, pulls himself to a seated position, and flicks the lighter open, blinking rapidly as the small cramped space fills with flickering yellow light. So he hasn’t gone blind. That’s good.

There’s a Sam-shaped lump asleep in the back, long legs folded awkwardly in the footwell, and that’s good too. He’s using his coat as a blanket so the only part of him that’s visible is his forehead (smooth and relaxed for once) and a mop of dark fluffy hair. Yesterday’s fight can’t completely erase the wave of annoyed affection that surges through Dean at the sight - goddamn stupid _Sam_ , who seems to thrive on making Dean’s life more difficult, just sleeping peacefully like the innocent child he used to be, only Dean knows he is anything but that, not any more. He hasn’t been for a long time.

Dean watches his brother for a couple of minutes, not thinking of anything, until he notices that it’s so cold that his breath is rising up in a cloud of steam in front of his face and that the windows are entirely steamed up.

Where the hell are they? Maine somewhere, or had they crossed into New Hampshire?

Something... something feels wrong. It’s too quiet, too cold. Dean can hear Sam’s regular breathing, loud and near and reassuring, but it sounds oddly amplified in the absence of _everything else_ \-- no wind, no birds, no crickets, no cars going by. And why is it so _dark_?

“Sam,” Dean says, but it’s only when he wipes the condensation from the windshield and sees a blank wall of _nothing_ that he starts to freak out, a prickling wave of goosebumps breaking out all along his arms. He rolls the passenger window all the way down as fast as his arm can move, but the result is the same except he can touch it now, lay his palm flat against the icy surface and feel it start to melt from his body heat.

“Sammy,” he repeats, a little louder. “Wake up, c’mon.”

Sam sits up abruptly, Ruby’s knife clutched tight in his hand, tense and prepared for a fight even though it’s clear by the foggy look in his eyes that his mind hasn’t quite caught up yet. He mumbles a sound that’s not quite a word. It sounds like a question.

“Um, I think we’ve been buried,” Dean says, not hysterical at all, thank you very much.

Sam blinks. “What?”

“Look.” Dean pokes his finger through the white wall and is mildly relieved to see that he can break the surface. At least they’re not encased in solid ice.

Sam rubs a hand over his eyes, shakes his head, blinks again. “Is that snow?”

“Yeah. In _July_.”

Dean has woken up to find himself buried alive once before, and he’s not exactly thrilled to be repeating the experience. There’s a part of him - a big freaking part, if he’s honest - that’s on the verge of panicking, of hyperventilating, of banging his fists against the windows, of shouting for help at the top of his lungs.

But he’s not alone in a pine box six feet under. He’s in a car with Sam, and that’s a familiar enough situation to keep the claustrophobia at bay, even if the specifics are pretty fucking weird. And Sam seems worried and confused but he’s not losing it, and he’s borderline nuts these days. If Sam can keep it together while he’s bad tripping on Hell memories, then the least Dean can do is keep his head on straight.

So. The good news is that they’re not buried very deep. Dean had thought it was still night but when he flicks his Zippo shut and lets his eyes adjust to the darkness, he can see that there’s dim light filtering through the snow from above. It’s not much, but it’s there.

“There’s sunlight somewhere up there,” Sam says, voice steady and reasonable. “All we have to do is dig towards it.”

*

When he finally breaks the surface, the light is so bright that Dean is blinded for a minute. He squeezes his eyes shut with a wince but he feels immediately better, takes in a deep lungful of fresh air. He wants to laugh with relief.

“Shit. Can you pass me my shades?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Sam says from below, still inside the car, and a minute later he presses them in Dean’s hand.

Dean pokes his head out of the hole in the snow, feeling a bit like seal breaking through the ice in one of those nature documentaries that Sam always insisted on watching when they were kids. The sky above is a clear cloudless blue, bright and crisp and endless. Everything else is a sea of white.

“Dean? What can you see?”

Dean can’t find any words other than _nothing_. He doesn’t answer, focuses on dragging himself out of their escape tunnel until he can stand on top of the car roof, ankle deep in snow. His jeans are already soaked through. He takes in his surroundings while Sam crawls out out of the hole and comes to stand next to him. He looks as freaked out as Dean is feeling.

Dean had parked just off the highway, he remembers that now, just a little dead-end stretch of dirt obscured by tall grass that the local law enforcement probably uses to set up speed traps.

Now there’s no tall grass, just snow everywhere in a seamless expanse where the road used to be, no buildings in sight, nothing to break the horizon but a row of snow-laden tall trees on either side of where the highway presumably is, buried several feet deep. There’s a crow or a raven watching them from where it’s sitting on top of the tallest tree, its feathers ruffled against the cold, the only other living creature in sight.

Dean pulls out his cell and isn’t very surprised to find that he can’t get any signal ‘cause that would’ve been too goddamn easy.

After a long moment of silence, Dean turns to his brother. Sam is squinting off into the distance, shoulders squared against the cold, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the ugly scar in the middle of his palm like maybe it will make this freak meteorological event disappear. The tip of his nose is bright red like it used to get after playing outside when he was a kid.

“And scientists say the world is getting warmer,” Dean says. “I call bullshit.”

Sam shoots him an annoyed look but he drops his hands to his sides. “This isn’t normal--”

“You think, genius?”

“...but whatever it is, we can’t stay here.”

“And where do you propose we go, Sammy?”

“That motel we passed last night, the one that was closed. It can’t be more than, what, five or six miles? If we follow the row of trees we won’t lose the highway.”

Dean considers this in silence for a moment. On the one hand, their car-cave provides decent shelter and they have sleeping bags and a couple of MRE rations in the back. On the other hand, they don’t know how long this July snow is going to last and neither of them have ever been very good with the concept of waiting something out. He’d rather be out there trekking through the snow and possibly dying of exposure than to stay here and do nothing.

“Yeah, alright.”

The crow caws loudly from the top of the tree, as though it agrees.

*

They switch places every half-hour or so - the one in the front plowing through waist deep snow to open the way, the one in the back pulling the makeshift sled they’ve made out of a tarp to carry their duffels, their survival gear and their entire arsenal. Like hell was Dean going to leave any of their precious weapons in that piece of shit car, not when there’s no way of knowing if they’ll find it again.

The progress is excruciatingly slow. They don’t talk much.

It’s quiet, just the sound of their heavy breathing and footsteps through the snow. They’d pulled off in the middle of nowhere, that’s true, but it seems like by now they should have seen someone, anyone. Snow plows or tractors to open the way, at least. Surely someone has to clear these roads eventually, but for now they might as well be alone in the world.

It’s cold still but the sun is bright right above their heads, and between the effort of trudging through the snow and the lack of breeze, it’s not long before they’re both sweating.

Dean keeps close behind Sam, his feet falling in each of his brother’s footsteps. Dean watches the line of sweat gathering at the back of Sam’s shirt, how his long hair curls wet at the back of his neck, how his ribcage expands huge with each breath, sucking in big lungfuls of cool air like bellows.

In the quiet, with just silence and whiteness and nothing else to look at all around, Dean is struck again by how huge Sam is. He forgets, sometimes. And this past year Sam’s been so quiet, so subdued, it’s made him seem smaller, like a sad, confused little kid. He’s not, though, he’s not anywhere near small. He’s built like Atlas, wide enough to carry the fucking world on his shoulders. Sam’s like a brick wall, big enough to block out the sun, and he’s got these limbs like goddamn tree trunks and his hands... His hands are so big that when they cup Dean’s cheek, his fingers span the corner of his lips to the back of his skull. Dean knows this because Sam kissed him yesterday.

Dean wasn’t as surprised as he should’ve been, maybe. Maybe he’d seen it coming in the way Sam’d been looking at him these past couple of weeks, full of this focused intent that hadn’t been there before.

The things is, the staring? That’s nothing new. There have been moments before, plenty of them. Tense, charged moments scattered over the years when their eyes locked for too long, when they stared at the wrong time, when touches lingered beyond anything that could be interpreted as innocent, as brotherly. Times when just the silent acknowledgement that they were on the same page, that the possibility was hanging in the air just within reach, was a bigger shock to the system than a shot of adrenaline to the heart. It’s just part of who they are, that thrum of tension, that twisted flicker of want that shows up from time to time. Dean’s accepted that. He’s accepted that it’s probably never going to go away. But the thing is, _the thing is_ , they were _never supposed to fucking act on it_. It’s there, they both know it, but they don’t talk about it and they sure as hell don’t go backing their brother into the side of the car in a deserted CVS parking lot and fucking _kiss him_ , soft and sweet, like it’s normal, like it’s something they do every day.

But enlightened New Sam, full of Hell hallucinations and positive thinking, he seems to have forgotten that last part. And that last part is pretty goddamned crucial, for Dean’s sanity if nothing else.

Dean did what he was supposed to do. He put his foot down, drew a line.

Leave it to Sam to sulk for the rest of the evening, to act like Dean was the one who was being unreasonable because he didn’t think that suddenly giving in to incestuous urges was a genius plan at this juncture. Shit, Sam is supposed to be the smart one. He should know better. You don’t upset the status quo like that with no warning, you don’t mess with a decade of repression and bring everything right back to the surface with one goddamn kiss - it’s so stupid it’s bordering on suicidal.

Stupid Sam and his stupid ideas. Stupid Sam and his stupidly long legs making it nearly impossible for Dean to follow in his footsteps. He’s probably lengthening his strides on purpose just to be a pain in the ass.

“Sam.”

Sam doesn’t stop right away, he keeps moving forward steadily with the momentum of an icebreaker, and it takes Dean saying his name three times before it seems to get through his thick skull. He looks a little dazed when he turns to look at Dean, his cheeks flushed and his hair limp with sweat.

“What?”

Dean frowns. “You still with me, Sammy?”

Sam blinks a couple of times, visibly clearing his mind of whatever was going on in there, then he shrugs. “Where else would I be?” he says, sounding a touch defensive.

“Well, you tell me.” Sam opens his mouth to reply but Dean shakes his head and cuts him off. “Nevermind. Drink some water.”

Sam takes the bottle and drains it in three long swallows and Dean tries not to look at the way his throat moves. They switch places and walk for another hour in silence.

*

By the time they reach the abandoned motel (the Red Rose Inn, air conditioning and color TVs), the sun is low on the horizon and Dean is exhausted, drenched in sweat and melted snow.

It’s a shitty run-down place, even by their standards. They’d stopped there the night before, figuring they might be able to break into one of the rooms for the night, but had to give up on that idea when they spotted the group of teenagers getting high in the parking lot. There are no teenagers around now, no tracks in the snow other than theirs.

They break into number 3, the only room in the row without any busted windows. Dean immediately makes his way past the bed (there’s still a bed, thank fuck, even if all the bedding has been stripped) and steps into the bathroom, opening both taps and waiting for a solid minute until he has to accept that nothing’s going to come out of the faucet. The toilet is dry and caked with rusty grime, the bathtub looks even worse, littered with dead flies and what looks suspiciously like mouse droppings.

“Too much to hope for that this dump would have running water, hunh?”

“Yeah. No power either, as far as I can tell,” Sam says from the doorway. He looks exhausted too, dark circles under his eyes and shoulders hunched, leaning against the door jamb like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “And still no cell reception.”

“Perfect,” Dean says. “Fuck.”

He brushes past Sam and sits down on the edge of the bed, ignoring the dubious yellow stain on the mattress, and rubs the heel of his hand over his forehead.

“So,” Sam says.

“Yeah.”

“There might be a way to turn the power back on.” It’s clear by the tone of Sam’s voice that he doesn’t hold out much hope.

*

If Dean ever met the guy responsible for the existence of MRE rations, he wouldn’t know whether to thank him or clock him across the jaw. They taste like shit, but they’ve saved them from going hungry more times than he can count, and it’s become a habit to keep a steady supply of them, same as with bullets or salt or lighter fuel.

‘Meals Rejects Eat’, Sam used to call them, fifteen years old, surly, and constantly hungry the way only teenage boys can be. Whenever John would hand him one of the truly disgusting ones, like that fucking vile chow mein or the so-called ‘Jamaican’ pork, Sammy would bitch and moan until Dean rolled his eyes and traded with him.

Tonight, Sam doesn’t have anything to say about the rations. He picks at his serving of ready-to-eat beef ravioli while flipping through Dad’s journal, a line of concentration across his brow -- like he hasn’t already read through the entire thing cover to cover fifty times over, like he actually expects to find something in there about freak July snow storms.

The silence weighs heavy in the room. Dean shovels his meal into his mouth and tries to think of nothing at all.

Dean cleans the guns, sharpens the knives, goes through their bullet and food inventory, makes a list of what they’ll need to buy next time they swing into a town, anything to keep his mind occupied, until Sam mumbles something about saving the batteries on their flashlights. He flips Dad’s journal shut and unfolds from his seat, stretching so tall his fingers brush the ceiling, his back popping loudly.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, I’m beat.”

Maybe if he sleeps, his brain will finally shut down for a while, stop replaying the same moment again and again, a five second reel consisting of Sam’s mouth on his, of Sam’s hand cupping his face.

A devil’s trap scratched into the ceiling above the doorway and salt-lined windowsills later, Dean turns to find Sam unrolling their sleeping bags side by side on the mattress. Dean eyes the bed, then arches an eyebrow in Sam’s direction.

Sam rolls his eyes, exhaustion evident in the set of his shoulders. “There’s only one bed, man. You wanna drag another mattress in from the room next door, no one’s stopping you.”

The mattress is old and sags down the middle. Little by little, both of their bodies slide towards the middle, inexorable like continental drift. Dean drifts off to sleep with his fingers curled around the hilt of his gun and the long warm line of Sam’s back solid against his.

*

It’s still dark when Dean wakes up to distressed-sounding mumblings in his ear. The dim moonlight through the blinds casts streaks of pale light across the bed and he can make out Sam twitching in the way he does when he’s about to wake up screaming from a nightmare.

He’d gotten a fist to the jaw once when he tried to wake him up too abruptly, so he turns to his side, pulls his hand out of the warm cocoon of his sleeping bag and gingerly puts it on Sam’s forearm.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Sam. Sammy.” Sam shivers, whole-bodied and violent, and Dean shifts a bit closer and grasps his brother’s hand, finding it balled into a tight fist. “Sammy,” he repeats, prying Sam’s fingers apart and sliding his own in the gap, brushing fingertips against Sam’s damp palm. “Sammy, wake up, it’s me.” Sam’s hand squeeze tight around Dean’s and he inhales sharply, his eyes snapping open, glimmering wetly in the darkness. For a second he looks completely lost.

“You alright, Sam?”

“I....” He blinks a few times before he manages to focus on Dean’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”

“Okay. Go back to sleep.”

That’s usually when Dean would retreat back to his own bed, but Sam’s still clutching his hand like a lifeline, and there’s nowhere else to go anyway. Dean grunts, uses his free hand to resettle himself inside his sleeping bag, and is asleep again before he can think about pulling his hand free.

*

Dean wakes up to find the other half of the bed empty, Sam’s sleeping bag open on top of his like a blanket.

Sam’s standing at the window, peering through the blinds with his back to the room, and Dean’s mind swims with images of Robo-Sam, who never slept, who paced motel rooms like a caged tiger. There’s nothing robot-like about the Sam who turns around, though. He’s unshaven and his hair could use a wash and he’s still wearing the clothes he slept in.

“It snowed again overnight,” Sam says.

Dean rubs a hand through his hair. The room is cold and he doesn’t really feel like emerging from his sleeping bag. “How bad?”

Sam doesn’t answer, just tilts his head towards the window and sets to making shitty coffee with the ration heater.

Dean swears out loud when he opens the door and snow tumbles on the grimy carpet and onto his feet. All of their tracks from the day before are gone, the snow pristine and glimmering in the sunlight, a smooth, unbroken field of white. It seems impossible but there’s even more of it now, at least a foot more than yesterday. A black bird circles ahead, just a small dot in the sky, and Dean briefly envies it, wishes he could get a bird’s eye view of this goddamn valley, see how far this snow stretches out. Maybe it’s just this area, maybe it’s the whole freaking country, there’s no way of knowing.

“What the fuck are we going to do, Sammy?”

Sam shrugs. He hands Dean some coffee in a chipped enamel cup and grimaces when he takes a gulp from his own.

*

They waste a good three hours clearing the way into the motel’s back office and trying to turn the power back on. There’s a crow perched on a tree nearby, probably the same one as the day before, and maybe Dean’s projecting but he’d swear the stupid thing was mocking their failure.

“I told you it wouldn’t work,” Dean says, irritated and jumpy from having Sam breathing down his neck for the better part of the morning.

“What do you want, a medal?”

“No, what I want is a cheeseburger, a cold beer, and a hot shower.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t always get what you want,” Sam says, and Dean can’t tell if that’s supposed to mean anything, if that’s some kind of passive-aggressive message, but he spends the rest of the afternoon with the song stuck in his head. He hums it under his breath until Sam snaps at him to shut up.

The highpoint of the day is finding the vending machine in the back of what used to be the laundry room. Dean takes an unhealthy amount of pleasure in smashing it open, and his efforts are rewarded with 3 bags of Cheetos, half a dozen candy bars and 18 of those fucking pre-packaged danishes that taste like cardboard with plastic icing on top.

“Check out all this loot!” Dean says, dumping an arm-full onto the bed. Sam barely looks up, his nose buried in Dad’s journal again.

*

Two days pass, nothing changes. The sun shines bright during the day but the snow doesn’t melt, and in the morning there’s always a fresh blanket of it, creeping higher and higher, threatening to bury the entire building.

Dean goes a little crazy, envisions spending all eternity in this godforsaken motel with his brain-damaged brother, eating MRE rations and Twix bars until they run out. He imagines them growing thinner and thinner, surviving on melted water and pine cones and the leather from their shoes while the snow falls, higher and higher until it buries them both alive.

He’s not sure how much longer he can take it, living in close quarters like this with nowhere to go, no music, no TV to distract him, no bar to escape to, no hunt to take up all of his time and attention, no other face but Sam’s, Sam Sam Sam who barely sleeps and holds onto him at night and keeps glancing at him, like maybe he’s thinking of backing Dean into a wall and kissing him again, and Dean’s starting to think that maybe he _wants_ him to because at least then maybe he would stop _thinking_ about it all the goddamned time.

“We have to leave, Sam.”

“And go _where_?”

“I don’t know, anywhere. We’ll go due south, find a town eventually.”

“It took us nearly a whole day going just a couple of miles from the car, Dean. And there’s even more snow now than there was then.”

“Okay, but what’s the alternative? Stay here until we starve? Screw that. This isn’t _Alive_. I’m not dying so you can eat the frozen meat from my bones.”

Sam snorts, almost a laugh, and shakes his head. Then he gets up, rolls his shoulders as he looks around the room. “No, you’re right.”

Dean lets out a relieved sigh, throwing his hands up. “Damn straight I am.”

“We should wait until first light tomorrow though.”

“No, yeah. Maximize daylight.”

“And maybe we could make some snowshoes. We’ve got rope and a tarp and if we break down some of those chairs...”

Dean grins. “That’s the Sammy I know. Let’s Macgyver us some snowshoes.”

*

The enthusiasm for their plan doesn’t last for long.

The sky is a bright cloudless blue when they set off but the wind picks up almost as soon as they’re out the door. There’s a line of clouds materializing in a thick blanket at the horizon, where it’s impossible to distinguish it from the layer of snow. Dean willfully ignore it for as long as he can, but it’s difficult not to notice how fast it’s moving, roiling closer and closer, engulfing the sky like a gray wave.

Dean crouches down for the third time to re-adjust the strap of his makeshift snowshoes around his left ankle, fingers clumsy and numb with the cold. When he stands back upright and looks up, it’s to find the sky entirely covered with thick clouds. Five minutes later, it starts snowing.

 _No no no no_ , goes Dean’s internal monologue, punctuating each of his steps forward. They have a goddamn plan. They have snowshoes. They’re going to get out of that place, they’re going to find people, they‘re going to figure out what the hell is going on. What they certainly aren’t doing is giving up because of a couple of snowflakes. The storm can go fuck itself.

Dean resettles the bag across his shoulders, pulls his hands back into his sleeves, keeps his head down and keeps moving.

“Dean!”

“Come on, Sam,” Dean shouts back, not turning around. “Don’t make me have to wait up for you.”

“We have to turn back.”

“The hell we are turning back.”

“Dean, look around you man. Look. We can’t even see where we’re going anymore.”

“I know exactly where I’m going,” Dean says, pointing straight ahead. “That way.”

Sam says something else but Dean can’t hear it over the whistling of the wind. He ignores Sam’s voice, growing steadily louder, until Sam’s hand on his shoulder drags him to a halt.

“I’m not going back, Sam.”

Sam’s bitchface is no less impressive even with the snow matting his hair. He throws his arms out, gesturing at the sea of gray-white all around them. He’s standing close but he still has to shout to make himself heard. “There is fuck all in sight, Dean! We might as well be at the North Pole.”

Dean shakes his head stubbornly, ignoring the cold sting of his ears, or the fact that he can’t really feel his toes anymore in his socks soaked through with sweat and melted snow. “How is that even possible?” he shouts back. “There should be houses, or farms. We should have seen people by now.”

“I don’t know. But listen, I think it’s snowing more and more the further out we go, like something wants to keep us there.”

“What? Who the hell would wanna do that? We haven’t seen anyone in days!”

“I don’t know, but if we keep going we’ll get lost and won’t be able to find our way back.”

“No.”

“Come on, Dean!”

“Listen, either we die out here or we die back there from starvation. I’ll take my chances out here.”

Dean starts to turn back around but Sam’s hand on his arm stops him again. Dean brushes him off and Sam grabs him again, forceful when he drags him back around by the collar of his coat. There’s a push and a shove and one of Dean’s stupid homemade snowshoes gets ripped off his foot when he lands backwards in the snow with Sam on top of him, dripping snow in Dean’s face.

“Get off me, Sam.”

“No.”

“What, you gonna kiss me again?”

“No.”

“Changed your mind? Came back to your senses all of a sudden?”

“No, I haven’t changed my mind. I just don’t really get the urge when you’re being a raging dick. I should just leave you here to freeze to death.”

But Sam struggles back to his feet and offers his hand out to pull Dean back upright. Snow trickles down the back of his collar, ice cold and wet. Sam, who has never looked more like a yeti in his life, is glaring at him and won’t let go of his hand, and Dean can’t see a thing beyond the two of them through the raging storm, can barely make out the shape of their tracks in the snow.

Dean closes his eyes for a moment against a wave of dizziness, fights the urge to sit down and refuse to move.

“I wish I had a fucking drink, Sammy.”

“I’ll make you some coffee when we make it back to the motel. Come on.”

Dean goes.

The cold is slowing Dean’s brain, his thoughts slow like molasses. His eyelashes are clumped with snow, his eyes stinging from the wind. It occurs to him to wonder how Sam is even functioning enough to know which way to go, but then Sam is always running hot, has always been able to stand the cold more than Dean has, like he’s powered by some kind of internal furnace. His grip on Dean’s hand is bordering on painful and Dean tries to shake him off a couple of times, but it only makes Sam’s grip tighter.

*

Dean’s swaying on his feet by the time they make it back to the shelter of the old motel. He can’t make himself stop shivering, can hardly feel his extremities anymore. Sam forces the door open and starts stripping from the moment they’re both inside. Dean watches him detachedly, his mind swimming.

“You know what would be good?” he mumbles, his words slurring together like he’s had one too many. “A tauntaun. A tauntaun to hide in.”

“Yeah?” Sam’s moved on to helping Dean with his clothes, his long fingers a deep angry red, lacking his usual dexterity. “Well, you don’t have a tauntaun. All you have is me and a couple of sleeping bags. Come on, Dean, help me out.”

“I don’t know which one’s worse, smell-wise.”

“Hilarious. Get these off before you go into shock.”

Dean's clothes are sodden, heavy with snow, and Dean is totally on board with getting them off, except he can’t seem to make his fingers move. But together they manage, somehow, and before long Dean finds himself ensconced in their zipped-together sleeping bags. Some immeasurable amount of time later Sam jostles him out of his shivering stupor and crawls in too, taking up nearly all the space with his stupidly overgrown body. Dean would complain, except that Sam is like a human space heater and brings with him a couple of warm water bottles. _The chemical ration heater_ , Dean thinks as he falls asleep, burrowing deeper in the warmth. _Smart Sammy_.

*

It’s hard to tell how much time has passed by the time Dean wakes up to painful tingling in his toes and fingers. Late afternoon, maybe, judging by the light coming in through the open blinds. The storm has completely died and the sky is cloudless again. Maybe Sam was right, maybe something is trying to trap them in this place.

Right now, though, it’s hard to worry about that. Sam’s big hand is running back and forth across the length of Dean’s arm, his breath damp and hot against the back of his neck, and it should weird him out to be pressed against so much naked skin that belongs to his brother, but Dean can’t find it in himself to care. He twists around in the confines of the sleeping bag to face Sam, their legs slotting together automatically.

Sam doesn’t even try to act innocent, just shifts his hand down to the small of Dean’s back as their eyes meet. Dean used to be able to read his brother like an open book but these days he’s never sure what’s going on in that big head of his. He wants to ask, ‘What are you thinking?’ but that’s such a ridiculous girly thing to say that Sam would probably never let him hear the end of it.

Instead, he says, “That was all a ploy to get me naked, wasn’t it? That’s fucked up, Sam.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Yeah, the whole hypothermia thing, totally my idea. You’re an idiot.”

It’s easy to let it happen, this time, in an abandoned motel under the snow with not a soul anywhere nearby, like they’re all alone in the world. Sam kisses him, and god knows why, Dean lets him. Maybe the past couple of days have fucked with his sense of self-preservation, or he’s still out of it from the hypothermia. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want to stop it, so he doesn’t.

Their teeth click together once, but then Sam licks at the seam of his lips and Dean opens up, his fingers tightening in Sam’s hair when Sam’s tongue strokes against his own, making him shiver. They kiss for a while, unhurried but not tentative, like this is something they do every day, like this is what they were always meant to be doing. It’s messed up, how comfortable and easy it feels, and it’s hard to remember precisely why he always thought this was a line they shouldn’t cross.

Dean pulls back to get his bearings but Sam doesn’t let him go far, his grip proprietary at the back of Dean’s neck.

“Why?” Dean says.

“I-- I don’t know. But you, we... You and me, we’ve always--”

“No, I know. But why _now_?”

Sam lets out his breath in a huff, warm against Dean’s cheek. “Maybe ‘cause the reasons ‘why not’ aren’t good enough for me anymore.”

“‘Cause you’ve lost your marbles. ‘Cause of the little devil on your shoulder.”

Sam snorts. “It’s not Lucifer who made me do it, Dean.”

“So what does he have to say about this?”

“He... well, he talks a lot about you. A lot.”

“Are you saying that the devil has the hots for me, Sam?”

Sam’s mouth twitches in a flicker of a smile but it’s humorless. “You do understand that it’s all in my head, right? Anyway, he’s not... he’s not here now.”

He’s getting that look on his face again, that self-deprecating subdued look that Dean hates, and he doesn’t want to see it now so he kisses him again, pressing closer and moaning when Sam sucks on his tongue, the pressure making him hot and dizzy. Sam pulls back just enough to nip at Dean’s lower lip, kisses the corner of his mouth, presses his lips against Dean’s cheekbones and his hands are _everywhere_ , huge and warm and alive.

There’s warmth pooling in his belly, arousal growing slowly and steadily, and he’s thinking of maybe doing something about it when Sam stops, his hand on Dean’s chest. He’s looking over Dean’s shoulder towards the window, a frown etched on his brow.

“What’s going on? Sammy?”

When Sam doesn’t answer, Dean twists around to follow his gaze just in time to see a black bird take flight from its perch on their windowsill.

“Okay, that’s not creepy at all,” Dean mumbles.

“It’s him! Or her.”

“What?”

There’s the sound of the zip sliding down and then a gust of cold air as Sam scrambles out of their joined sleeping bags. Dean mourns the loss of all that warmth, turned on and a little annoyed.

“What about it?”

Sam starts putting on clothes at the speed of light, a sight that would be amusing if Dean wasn’t so confused. “It’s doing this, it has to be. It’s been following us all this time, hasn’t it? When we climbed out of the car and every day since. And I’m sure it was perched on the roof of the motel when we got back in during the storm. And look how big it is!”

Dean squints. “You’re saying that a _bird_ \--”

“Hey!” Sam shouts, throwing the door open, his deep voice reverberating in the snowy landscape. “Hey, you! It’s you who’s doing this, hunh? You’re not a crow!”

Dean gets up from the bed, wrapping the sleeping bags around his shoulders like a cape. The bird is there alright, perched on the broken down motel sign. It ruffles its feathers, caws like a taunt, and takes flight again. It looks huge against the blue sky, its wingspan wide as an eagle’s. Now he’s looking at it, really looking at it, Dean’s pretty sure he’s never seen a bird that big.

“I think it might be an old god, Dean. That’s the only thing that would have the juice for something like this.”

That’s really all Dean needs to hear. He shoves his feet in his boots and grabs his gun, and is halfway out the door shouting, “Hey! Come back here, bird brain!” before Sam reels him back in.

“Put some clothes on, you moron,” he says with a laugh. He laughs so rarely these days that Dean forgets sometimes how beautiful he is when he does it. It makes the lines in his forehead smooth out and his eyes light up. A slightly sick feeling unfurls in the pit of Dean’s stomach, something not unlike vertigo.

 _Sammy_ , Dean thinks, heartbeat thundering in his temples. He wants to hug him tight and press his nose into the crook of his neck, or punch him to stop him looking like that, or push him down onto the floor because screw it, screw everything else--

“Caw! Caw!” the bird says from above, and it sounds like _fuck you_ to Dean’s ears, snapping him out of it.

\--but there’ll be time for that, for them. Right now they have wooden stakes to sharpen, because that fucking feathered son of a bitch is going down.


End file.
